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Month: December 2016

In Geoffrey Moore’s book, crossing the chasm, he refers to those who jump on new technologies before the mainstream markets as innovators and early adopters.

For many products and services I a solid Pragmatist, waiting until there is significant adoption of the technology before I jump on board. When it came to getting rid of cable television, I was absolutely a market innovator. It wasn’t so much of a drive for new technology as my hatred of paying Comcast for something I could stream over the internet. In this series I wanted to go through some of the choices I made on the way to cutting the cord, including services, streaming devices, and others.

Netflix

I was an early adopter of the Netflix DVD service, and an immediate adopter of their streaming service. A number of the devices I purchased early in this process were because they supported Netflix Streaming. In the past few years I have noticed significant decreases in the quality of the content available from legacy networks. Fortunately the original content has been more entertaining, with apparent investment in new content becoming a priority. The biggest advantage of Netflix is the number of devices available to stream it, and their recent introduction of offline viewing.

Amazon Prime Video

As a current subscriber to Amazon prime, I occasionally watch Amazon prime video. The main advantage to Amazon prime is the original content, it’s inclusion in my subscription, and their pioneering offline viewing of content. As someone who travels regularly this is a necessity. My biggest complaint outside the lack of content is the limit on devices. Due to apparent licensing disagreements there is no Amazon Video app for the Apple TV, a minor issue, but frustrating.

Hulu

I wanted to like Hulu, I really did, and at times I have used it to catch up on shows. When they released their paid model for the Apple TV I tried it for a month or so. My biggest complaint is they are essentially aggregating content from networks, much of which is accessible through separate apps, and the paid service still has commercials. Hulu is good in concept, with some good original content, but is lost in the plethora of streaming services.

Streaming services are the future of television there is no doubt about it. Live television is inconvenient, and for the next generation will likely be a forgotten relic, much like the cassette tape. My biggest complaint is the lack of an aggregator, I use Plex media server for my personally owned content. Unfortunately this means I need to select what I want to watch across several services, with more coming regularly. While Apple is working on resolving this with the “TV” app on iOS and TVOS, this is proprietary, and limited. The future of television and entertainment must come from fewer apps with more content, not the reverse. It is an exciting time, as long as you don’t make your living providing cable television services.